Tasneem Fared, clad in a white bridal dress, tells the story of a horrific night in Syria in the documentary The Bride’s Side. That night, she recalled, she danced away, using music to drown out the sound of exploding bombs, occasionally taking off an earplug to check whether her home had been shelled.

Angie Gualtieri holds a book in her hands. Tales of Todmorden Veterans by Jack Aldred. It’s obvious this book means a lot to her.

Gualtieri recalls when the roof at her Royal Canadian Legion Todmorden, Branch 10, needed fixing. The branch couldn’t afford to fix it. Jack Aldred, a well-loved member of the branch, stepped up. Proceeds from Aldred’s helped raise money for the roof repairs.

The year was 1912. On April 15, the sinking RMS Titanic sent out distress signals received by nearby ships. While more than 1,500 died in the sinking, during the next few hours on the North Atlantic, rescue ships picked up more than 700 survivors. Marc Raboy believes there was an upside to the disaster.

“(It) really opened the imagination to the importance of wireless communication,” he said. He credits wireless radio inventor Guglielmo Marconi.

“The world would never be the same again,” Raboy said. “We now had the capacity to do long distance communication.”

As the years go by the more people get obsessed with looking young and beautiful. Some are willing to using weird ingredients, participate in beauty trends that can be harmful such as tattooed makeup, while some put too much glitter on places people wouldn’t usually— or even get facials there (but that can be for cleansing purposes too, so we’ll let it slide). Now you can look just as good looking as those sexy fictional vampires by getting a vampire facial (even though that’s not really what it does). You can relax while somebody smears bird poo on your face, it’s not gross if it’s for beauty, right? They are some people that try to rejuvenate the skin by putting on a placenta mask. Better yet, just freeze yourself in the name of beauty.

Pricilla Daniel sits in a large dining area at the Ontario Science Centre. She’s just had an unexpected movie experience.

“I thought we were just going to watch a movie,” she said, “but it was more than a movie. This was an experience.”

Shronak Datta saw the same movie. It explored an unusual aspect of engineering.

“Engineering is often too closely associated with economics,” he said. “The movie focused away from that and focused on how engineering is a method of problem solving in society. That really resonated with me.”

A prominent Toronto journalist, originally from Trinidad and Tobago, says that racism has always existed in the news media industry where he works.

Jules Elder, a founding member of the Canadian Association of Black Journalists (CABJ), spoke to journalism students at Centennial College’s Story Arts Centre on Feb. 14. In the mid-1970s he helped launch Share Newspaper, a weekly newspaper serving the Black and Caribbean communities in Toronto.

Rich Pearson learns more and more about the music he performs, especially this time of year.

When he recently sang Paul McCartney’s lyrics, “Blackbird singing in the dead of night, take these sunken eyes and learn to see; all your life, you were only waiting for this moment to be free,” he realized the song wasn’t about birds at all.

“(McCartney) was thinking about the civil rights movement at that time he wrote it; he wrote it at the 68,” Pearson said.